PEP 639 - Towards licensing standardization in Python packaging

Abstract

Declaring license metadata in Python packaging has got many pitfalls. The current standard doesn’t meet the needs of the wider public, including downstream packagers (e.g. Linux distributions). Trove classifiers are all but precise. Every build backend comes up with its own idea how to fill in the data in pyproject.toml or their custom formats. It comes hardly as a surprise that there’s an existing attempt to fix the landscape with standardization: PEP 639. In my talk I’ll outline what the proposal is about and how it’s been developing over the years. I’ll summarize the current state and the next steps. This includes the introduction of SPDX expresssion syntax, changes to the project metadata declaration, changes to the core metadata, improved glossary and some more.